Our Two-Week Marathon: Preparing for October 3&4 GRAND OPENINGS

Our work at COSAD Tanzania has gone from 10mph to 100mph in just a few days.  Almost one week ago, our director and his family arrived in Bukoba to finish several details for our Social Enterprise Projects’ Grand Openings on October 3rd & 4th.These Social Enterprise Projects (SE Projects) include the COSAD Women’s Cooperative Goat Farm, the COSAD Clinic, Imuka Recording Lounge, and the Bukoba Business Lounge.  Each project will be run as a local, private business for profit, to support COSAD’s existing programs and goals.  For example, the COSAD Women’s Cooperative Goat Farm raises and breeds the specific breed of goats best suited for milk production, locally.  This means we no longer have to buy and transport the goat from different cities (or countries in some cases), greatly decreasing the cost we once had to raise to give one woman a goat in the One Woman, One Goat (OWOG) program.  Further, the goat farm will be used as a free training facility to easily train women with goats on best-practices and proper care.  The profits from the goat farm (as with all of our SE Projects) will be used to help support COSAD programs like OWOG that used to be solely reliant on donations from the USA to be successful. 

The theories behind the business structure of each SE Project are a big step in striving towards COSAD’s vision of “empowering Tanzanians to become economically independent, one community at a time”.  Of course, theories, planning, and preparation are only the beginning stages of any project, and that is exactly where we are in Bukoba right now: preparing and praying for the success of our SE Projects after our Grand Openings on October 3rd & 4th!

Our Grand Opening will be a two-day event ‘opening’ all four of our SE Projects, and it is meant to serve as a marketing event & open house so our community can connect with the services the clinic, business lounge, and recording studio will provide.  Our women and village partners will be a huge part of the Grand Openings, and rightly so.  Since my visit in 2012, I have been hearing how anxious and ready the women are to see further growth that will help their communities; especially in regards to the opening of the clinic.  The Grand Openings ceremony will be in line with the Tanzanian cultural expectations for such an ceremony- meaning lots of singing, dancing, food, and speeches!  (I will post pictures!)

For those of you who would like to know more about each SE Project and how it will affect and contribute to the mission of COSAD, I will follow up with more details in my coming posts.  For now, I wanted to highlight the basics for our Grand Openings, and invite you to celebrate with us since they are a major source of excitement and celebration within the COSAD Tanzania community this month!

Posted by Editorial Team on 12:25 PM in GRAND Openings

Izigo Village: COSAD’s First Partner

Earlier this month, the COSAD team went to Izigo Village located about 25 miles from Bukoba.  Izigo was the first village COSAD partnered with eight years ago.  The people living in Izigo have been described as “vibrant” and “terrific to partner with”.  

The COSAD office team visited Joyce and her husband who are leaders for Izigo’s COSAD projects.  Their home doubles as the “COSAD-Izigo” meeting place when the need arrises.  We visited Joyce’s home to briefly introduce myself and our new office staff, and to give her information about COSAD’s grand openings in October since Izigo will be a big part of it.  While we were in Izigo, Joyce took us to visit Anita Mkiza, one of the women who received a goat through COSAD’s OWOG program in 2009.  Over the past seven years, Anita’s first goat became a mother to four thriving goats under her care (as you can see in the pictures)!  Curious of the details and resilience of the OWOG program, I asked if she had any goats die over the last five years.  She said two baby goats had died.  In my brief time with Anita, I was encouraged and inspired (perhaps even more so after hearing of the past unfortunate deaths) by Anita’s story because I thought it illustrated perfectly the resilience, benefits and sustainability of the OWOG program.  COSAD may be the vehicle that arranges logistics, volunteers, donations, and resources for this program, but the women leaders and recipients in the villages are the ones who make the program a complete success story by their passion and outstanding work ethic! 

Since our visit to Izigo was not purposed for intensive surveying as our trips to Kangabusharo and Kagondo were, I relied on my growing knowledge of Swahili and our team’s on-the-fly translations to gather our information.  Having said that, please leave a little room for slight variations of “hard facts” if you’re keeping score :).

Posted by Editorial Team on 5:35 AM in GRAND Openings, The COSAD Medical clinic, The Goat Farm

Our Two-Week Marathon: Preparing for October 3&4 GRAND OPENINGS

Our work at COSAD Tanzania has gone from 10mph to 100mph in just a few days.  Almost one week ago, our director and his family arrived in Bukoba to finish several details for our Social Enterprise Projects’ Grand Openings on October 3rd & 4th.

These Social Enterprise Projects (SE Projects) include the COSAD Women’s Cooperative Goat Farm, the COSAD Clinic, Imuka Recording Lounge, and the Bukoba Business Lounge.  Each project will be run as a local, private business for profit, to support COSAD’s existing programs and goals.  For example, the COSAD Women’s Cooperative Goat Farm raises and breeds the specific breed of goats best suited for milk production, locally.  This means we no longer have to buy and transport the goat from different cities (or countries in some cases), greatly decreasing the cost we once had to raise to give one woman a goat in the One Woman, One Goat (OWOG) program.  Further, the goat farm will be used as a free training facility to easily train women with goats on best-practices and proper care.  The profits from the goat farm (as with all of our SE Projects) will be used to help support COSAD programs like OWOG that used to be solely reliant on donations from the USA to be successful. 

The theories behind the business structure of each SE Project are a big step in striving towards COSAD’s vision of “empowering Tanzanians to become economically independent, one community at a time”.  Of course, theories, planning, and preparation are only the beginning stages of any project, and that is exactly where we are in Bukoba right now: preparing and praying for the success of our SE Projects after our Grand Openings on October 3rd & 4th!

Our Grand Opening will be a two-day event ‘opening’ all four of our SE Projects, and it is meant to serve as a marketing event & open house so our community can connect with the services the clinic, business lounge, and recording studio will provide.  Our women and village partners will be a huge part of the Grand Openings, and rightly so.  Since my visit in 2012, I have been hearing how anxious and ready the women are to see further growth that will help their communities; especially in regards to the opening of the clinic.  The Grand Openings ceremony will be in line with the Tanzanian cultural expectations for such an ceremony- meaning lots of singing, dancing, food, and speeches!  (I will post pictures!)

For those of you who would like to know more about each SE Project and how it will affect and contribute to the mission of COSAD, I will follow up with more details in my coming posts.  For now, I wanted to highlight the basics for our Grand Openings, and invite you to celebrate with us since they are a major source of excitement and celebration within the COSAD Tanzania community this month!  

Posted by Editorial Team on 8:38 AM in GRAND Openings